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Here's what you'll find in this issue:

This founder built a viral loop into a one-day MVP. It now brings in up to $17k/month.
5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
Yesterday's build board winners, including three new product launches from indie hackers.
30-second growth tip: Open-source your product to generate 24,000 visitors in a day.

AI assistants are evolving. Hatch is the next generation. Try Hatch free.

He Built a Viral Loop Into a One-Day MVP 🔁

Antonio Escudero had $4k left, a one-way ticket to Vietnam, and a startup making less than $300 a month. After abandoning three projects, leaving his CS degree, and dealing with pressure to get a normal job, he built RankInPublic: a site where founders enter their SaaS products into head-to-head matchups, then share their listing to win community votes. It jumped to $17k in one month and now brings in $11k to $17k monthly.

The first version cost almost nothing. A cheap .xyz domain, free hosting and infrastructure, and a day spent prompting Gemini. As is increasingly the case in the AI age, distribution was the biggest lever. The site gives every founder a concrete reason to share. Meaning the USERS of the app were its co-promoters.

Definitely check out this interview! Antonio shares how he got the idea, built the product, and did the marketing (e.g. a breakdown of how he turned lead-magnet posts into 20k+ daily impressions then used this demand for directory submissions to build a 65%-margin service). Enjoy!

Read the full article →

One dedicated CPA, plus software that never lets the numbers go stale. 🧠

Gelt is a year-round tax firm for founders, operators, and high-income earners with complicated returns.

The usual setup is familiar to anyone who has run a company. A CPA surfaces at filing time, statements get handed over, and a return comes back describing what already happened. That is fine for compliance. It does nothing for strategy, because by then every decision worth making has already been made by default.

Gelt replaces that with two things working together. A named CPA who owns the relationship and knows how the entities are stacked, and a platform that keeps books, documents, and projections current so the conversation is about choices rather than cleanup.

Founders who get the most out of it tend to have the messiest situations: an operating company and a holding company, K-1s from side investments, contractors in four states, equity that vested at an inconvenient moment, a spouse with a business of their own. Those situations reward planning and punish autopilot.

Timing matters too. September and early October are when the remaining moves for the year are still on the table, including prior-year retirement funding for extension filers. By spring, most of that window has closed.

Founders can schedule a call to walk a Gelt CPA through their structure and hear what is worth changing before year end. Mention Indie Hackers in your contact us form to receive 10% off your first year of strategy.

See how Gelt works

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Cursor: AI code editor that predicts your next edit and understands your project context.
Tabnine: Enterprise-grade AI coding agents with total privacy and local control.
Bolt.diy: Open-source, self-hosted community fork of Bolt.new featuring total model flexibility.
v0: The comprehensive coding agent platform to build and deploy full-stack applications from natural language prompts.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Open-source your product to generate 24,000 visitors in a day.

Todd Hooper built Prerender․io to help JavaScript-heavy websites show up in search. He made the first version over a weekend, open-sourced it, and put up a simple page explaining what it did. That page pulled in 24,000 visitors on day one.

The traffic told him the problem was much bigger than he thought. It also gave developers a way to try the tech before paying for the hosted version. Prerender․io eventually grew to $220,000 in monthly revenue, with the open-source project doing most of the marketing.

Read the full growth report →

The Build Board 🪧

Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

	1. Hivemind: AI strategist built from Myosin's top marketing minds Eider's headline is "settled." Its soul is "it doesn't enforce." It's selling the wrong one.	▲ 16

	2. Mortgage Overpayment Calculator: Free Mortgage Overpayment Calculator and Guides Building a Free Mortgage Overpayment Calculator for UK Homeowners	▲ 10

	3. Vouch: Find who you already know at companies hiring right now I built a tool that finds people you already know at companies hiring right now (solo project; would love feedback)	▲ 6

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

AI assistants are evolving. Hatch is the next generation. 🧠

AI models have evolved. ChatGPT has not.

We're still using the same old AI assistant products we were using in 2022, even though the models underneath them keep getting better.

It's time for the next generation of AI assistants.

Introducing Hatch, the most productive AI assistant ever made.

From the creators of Indie Hackers, Hatch was thoughtfully crafted to help you get real work done. From floating windows to tagging documents, we've reimagined every aspect of your daily AI assistant to help you operate at a higher level.

Try Hatch free. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off for 1 month.

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

At times like these (and not many others) I'm glad I majored in English!

—Channing

We'd love your feedback! 🙃

Did you like today's stories? Did they suck? Which ones?

We're constantly changing things up to make this newsletter more useful, so let us know what you think by replying directly to this email. We read every reply!

Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to James Fleischmann for contributing a post.

—Channing

Indie Hackers | 522 W Riverside Ave #6526, Spokane, WA, 99201

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🗞️ What's New: $17k after 3 failed projects, open source for 24k visitors, clear thinking in the AI era